This thesis presents the poetics of modernity and the presentation of female characters in the works of Dinko Šimunović and Milan Begović. At that time, women were marked by stereotypes in Croatian literature, and changes began to occur only at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The reasons for the stereotypes stemmed from a patriarchal society that denied women the opportunity to stand out in any way. In that period, in Croatian literature there were several types of women: the fatal woman, the house angel, the spiritual woman and a woman on her way to self-awareness. In the analyzed corpus of about thirty stories by both authors, all types of women are found, but mostly the very beautiful and attractive ones. The views of the authors describing the fate of women are somewhat different because Šimunović is focused primarily on the depiction of patriarchal male-female relations from the point of view of superiority and subordination while in Begovićs works one of the main motives is physical desire, i.e. the individual male desire for a woman and vice versa that show all the complexity of biological and erotic instincts in a man. Despite these differences, realistically-naturalistically written stories, plastically shaped characters, especially female ones, the use of impressionistic procedures in characters descriptions and landscapes as well as their complementarity, and the emotional and dramatic charge often reveal only the apparent divergence of these two authors.